Representation of machines and mechanisms in augmented reality for educative use Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature.Mobile devices and augmented reality are powerful technological advances used in a wide area of applications and with great potential in engineering education. Nowadays, education, in general, faces several challenges, among them, keeping the attention and engagement of the students in the classroom and motivating the students to self-learn. Augmented reality (AR) is an option to reverse this situation. This work presents an analysis of current augmented reality technologies and a review of the current state-of-the-art of augmented reality introduced in teaching, especially focusing on engineering at the undergraduate level. This research aims to investigate the impact of AR on student attitude, engagement, and student understanding of the concepts of mechanical engineering. The contribution of this work is the generation of an augmented reality app for mobile devices to aid in the understanding of planar mechanisms by displaying models of simple machines. The augmented reality simulation allows the three-dimensional representation of the planar mechanisms as well as several possible interactions, plots, and calculations. The students used the mobile app and solved a simple exercise. Furthermore, a questionnaire was applied to capture their perceptions of using augmented reality in their classes of mechanical engineering. The evaluation of the exercise, as well as the results of the questions, indicated that the students had a positive perception of the use of augmented reality in the classroom. Also, augmented reality increased their engagement and improved their comprehension of the components of the mechanisms.

publication date

  • January 1, 2022